“If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘Thank you’, that would be enough” -Meister Eckhart
This also isn’t about keeping a gratitude diary and paying more attention to our good fortune – the psychology of the headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry is for another time.
You might be surprised that we’re making a leap from a story of persecution and oppression to what might come off on a lecture on gratitude, but you shouldn’t be. Nothing makes a body more grateful for what they have then knowing how quickly and easily it can be taken away. It is not unique to the Mennonite story for people suffering great hardship to actually consider themselves as more happy, more fortunate, and more grateful than others in a considerably cushier environment might do. (Among many, see “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Owning up to understanding very little about the human psyche under duress, it seems that counting your blessings (and meaning it) does somewhat lend itself to an inner calm and mental fortitude that assist in persevering against all odds. As such, gratitude is a foundation of the Mennonite faith and is evidenced by the theme running rampant through their hymnals. To cite one example - Now thank we all our god (originally in the German) is a very simple, very pretty hymn about being grateful for blessings and guidance and love. To illustrate this quintessential story is this note on the writer, straight from Wikipedia:
“Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran minister who came to Eilenburg, Saxony at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. The walled city of Eilenburg became the refuge for political and military fugitives, but the result was overcrowding, and deadly pestilence and famine. Armies overran it three times. The Rinkart home was a refuge for the victims, even though he was often hard-pressed to provide for his own family. During the height of a severe plague in 1637, Rinkart was the only surviving pastor in Eilenburg, conducting as many as 50 funerals in a day. He performed more than 4000 funerals in that year, including that of his wife.”
And then he wrote a hymn about gratitude.
Which goes to show that we really have no excuses for taking our incredible existence in this beautiful world for granted. So BE GRATEFUL. It really doesn’t matter who you’re thanking, just be overwhelmed with appreciation for the fact that YOU. ARE. HERE. To quote Richard Dawkins on sheer improbability of every detail of space and time lining up just right for you to exist right now: (be sure to read this in a posh british accent):
we really are grotesquely lucky to be here.
In discussing humility I mentioned re-focusing on priorities, and yeah yeah less is more but in whittling down life to the merest essentials and then filling your heart with gratitude for that which you have, drawers become empty but lives become full.
Too cheesy?
How about this one liner on the subject of appreciation that knocked me back a step and made me give pause:
“what if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you’d been thankful for today?”
Yes, having grown up Sunday school and devotions and saying grace and prayers and yet having abandoned most of it, it might seem odd to be writing at length on being Mennonite now. But some things stuck (this whole ramble is about exactly that), and this point at the foremost. All other aspects of faith or spirituality or religion aside: if the only prayer I say in my life is ‘Thank you’, that is enough.